The topic is safety of supplements. As a medical doctor and naturopathic doctor, I know food supplements are crucial to the public, and putting them back in a food category ensures access. Keeping them in a drug category or a third category under drugs may mean that people will have to have a prescription from a medical doctor or naturopathic doctor for certain supplements or certain potencies of supplements. This will be cost prohibitive for most people and would serve no purpose.

High personal cost of drug therapy
In hospital adverse drug reactions, or ADRs, there were 106,000 annual deaths. These are American figures, but the extrapolation would be 10% for Canadians. Deaths due to medical error were at 98,000. Bed sores, infections, malnutrition, outpatient ADRs, needless procedures, and surgery-related diseases added up to 783,936 annual premature deaths due to modern medicine.

Safety differences between drugs and vitamins
The question about supplements seems to reside in supplements being dangerous; therefore, they should be treated like drugs and regulated as drugs. However, the two charts that I have coming up show that dietary supplements may have one death in 100,000 related to them. Food-related deaths are up to 240 deaths per 100,000; prescribed drugs, 5,180 per 100,000; and modern medicine mistakes, 784,000 annually, making medicine 784,000 times more dangerous than dietary supplements.

In North America we have a tradition of using supplements. The distinguished Dr. Abram Hoffer, began treating schizophrenia with B vitamins in the 1950s. Drs. Evan and Wilfred Shute of Ontario were treating heart disease with vitamin E in Canada, in Ontario, in the 1960s. Dr. Linus Pauling promoted vitamin C not only for the common cold but for dozens of other conditions as well.

In Germany, where modern medicine originates, there is the belief that vitamins and minerals can be obtained from food, and are only needed in low potencies to stave off deficiency disease. It is this view that is driving the world toward placing dietary supplements under a drug category. This bias does not take into consideration the overwhelming deficiencies of nutrients in our food supply.

Our food supply is low in minerals and in nutrients. Flour is deficient in vitamin E, B6, magnesium, riboflavin, niacin B vitamins, fibre, zinc, potassium, iron, copper, selenium, B12, and folate.

Are supplements dangerous? There is a myth that vitamin C causes kidney stones, but the fact is that not one reported case can be found in the literature. There is a myth that vitamin E is harmful, but this pertains only to synthetic vitamin E. In 1941 the drug industry was successful in getting its synthetic form of vitamin E passed as the international standard.

Supplements are regulated as drugs, but the public loses. I emphasize that supplements are safe and there are no benefits to keeping them in a drug category.

Finally, Canadian health care is based on access to all. Therefore, why would we limit access to necessary dietary supplements?

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